Roles are standardized labels for the positions people hold on your team, such as Designer, Developer, or Producer. Roles help you organize your team, plan projects, and find the right person for specific work. Each role can have default rates that apply automatically when the role is scheduled.

Float uses three types of roles: general unassigned roles, people roles, and project roles.

An unassigned role can be described as a role-based placeholder used in project planning when you don't yet know which specific person will do the work. Unassigned roles help you estimate, scope, and plan projects more accurately, so that costs, margins, and hiring needs are accounted for before people are named. You can add unassigned roles to projects or to specific project phases, then assign them to actual team members later. 

A person's role is their primary assigned role, set in their profile. It represents their default position in your organization and determines their default rates.

A project role is the role a person performs on a specific project. It can differ from their primary people role, apply different default rates, and vary by project or even by project phase, all without changing the person's primary role.

Access to Roles management is limited to Account Owners and Admins only.

All your team's roles are managed in one place: Data studio > Roles. This is where you view, edit, and delete roles, and sort them by name, cost rate, active people, and unassigned.

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The display setting allows you to hide/show specific columns on the Roles page:

To add a role:
1) Navigate to Data studio > Roles,

2) Click on the plus button (+),

3) Enter the role's name,

4) Optionally add cost rate,

5) Click Save role.

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📝Note: You cannot add two or more roles with the same name.

💡 Here's a tip: Roles can also be added via CSV upload on the People page or via the roles API endpoint.

1) Navigate to Data studio > Roles,

2) Click on the role's name,

3) Use the action menu at the top of the side panel and select Delete.

📝Note: You can only delete a role when it isn't assigned to any people or projects. Click the number under the Active people or Unassigned column to review and update the role's assignments. Once the role is no longer in use, you can delete it.

Role rates are the default cost and bill rates that you can assign to specific roles within your team. These rates automatically apply when you assign a role to a team member.

Cost rates reflect the real expense your business incurs to employ people, including salaries and overhead. They're internal-facing, often contain sensitive salary information, and are used to calculate the true cost of delivering projects. At Float, cost rates can be set up at the role or person-level. They cannot be customized per project or per project phase.

Cost rates on the role level can be set up by the Account Owner and Admins in Data studio > Roles.

When role cost rates are set, any new person assigned to that role automatically inherits the role’s cost rate. Learn moe about cost rates hierarchy here.
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Cost rates support point-in-time effective dates. This keeps historical reporting accurate and lets you schedule future changes. When you update a cost rate, you can set it to:

To edit or delete an existing rate, hover over a specific date and click the three-dots action menu:

​📝Note: When you update a role rate, you'll be asked to confirm that the change affects people already assigned to that role. The new cost rate doesn't affect people who have custom person rates set.

You assign each team member a role in the Info tab of their profile. Every role in use is available from the drop-down for quick assignments. If the selected role has default rates set, they appear below the name. Account Owners and Admins can also create a new role on the go by typing its name in the Role field. 
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When you first assign a role to a person, it applies from their start date. If no start date is set, the role applies to all points in time. The person inherits the default cost rate and bill rate from the selected role (unless a custom rate is applied).

A person’s role can be updated in the Info tab of their profile.

When you change the role of the person who uses rates inherited from the role-level, you’ll be prompted to:

Each role update:

The Role field in a person’s profile always reflects their current role. To view any previous or planned role updates, open View changes to see the full history.

If a person has personal rates set, the role rates are strikethrough to indicate that they have been overwritten. When changing the role of a person who already has custom person rates set, you will also be asked to choose to:

If you choose to use the existing person rates, they will be preserved and applied from the selected effective date, while the role itself will be changed.

If you choose to apply the new role rates from a specific date onward, historical personal rates will be maintained.

If you choose to apply the new role rates to all past and future days, any historical personal rates will be removed.

To view the history of role and cost rate changes, use the View changes button. This is where you can use the trash bin icon to delete specific role changes or custom cost rates. You can also delete a role change and re-add it with a different effective date, or override existing history entries by assigning a new role or rate for the same date. Changes in the View changes are not saved until you click Update person.

📝Note: Role-level cost changes are listed in the history as well, but they cannot be removed from the personal level. To modify them, navigate to Data studio > Roles.

If you want to update the role for several team members, you can use the bulk edit function on the People page. After selecting two or more team members, set the new role and choose the effective date.

Once roles have been assigned to all team members, it is easy to find the right person for the job by searching for a specific role on your Schedule or Project plan. You can also sort your team by roles alphabetically.

💡 Here's a tip: Align the roles you use in Float and update any internal governance documentation so your resource managers know which roles to filter by.
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You can assess your team's performance by role in the Roles tab of the People Report.

The Roles tab lists all the roles currently assigned to your projects, both assigned to team members and unassigned. You can use it to analyze how much capacity is allocated to each role, how much has already been scheduled, and whether that work is billable or non-billable, so you can make informed scheduling decisions.

To include or exclude unassigned roles in your reports, use the People: Unassigned filter.

💡 Here's a tip: If you notice significant overtime being logged for a particular role, the Roles tab allows you to drill down and investigate further. You can ascertain whether a single team member is consistently logging overtime or if the role itself is over-scheduled. If it’s an individual consistently working overtime, consider splitting their work with other teammates with the same or similar role, starting a recruitment process to alleviate their workload, or engaging freelancers to assist.